our planet is heating up and i want to know do you think we should act?…..in 18 years we are going to see huge effects on our world….we have all seen the ice melting and i hope it hits you all that animals are becoming extinct like tigers and polar bears…………………………………………………………………………………………….we are only going die no need to worry george bush has banned global warming and he wont let anyone help the fact that the whole world is heating up therefore massive floods effecting us all now think about that….
so my main question is…
DO YOU THINK GLOBAL WARMING IS EFFECT US AND WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT GEORGE BUSH.??
WHAT DO YOU THINK CAN HELP GLOBAL WARMING AND DO YOU CARE?
Climate Change Bill
27th November 2008 saw the passing of the Climate Change Bill in the UK which aimed to see significant cuts in the UK CO2 emissions in order to tackle climate change. There were three main points in this bill. Firstly to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050, this is the level that scientists believe is required if we are to see a turn in the tide of the current climate change. Secondly the bill included changes that mean that international aviation and shipping – that fastest growing source of emissions – emissions are now included in the targets. Finally, the bill also laid out that there be annual budgets for spending on carbon in order that the emission cuts could be more measurable and kept on top of.
Climate effects on the poor
Climate change is something that is talked about mostly in the context of the developed world. This is because most of the contribution and consequently, the ability to reduce, climate change is from the western world. However, the other side to the story is that it is the developing world that, despite contributing very little, is bearing the brunt of climate change.
The main reasons for this unbalanced impact are because people living in poorer areas of the world are more likely to live in fragile housing, to rely on agriculture for a lot of their income and have no back up of insurance or savings in the event of disaster. All of these factors make them very susceptible to changes in climate.
Every year, 150,000 people die from health-related effects of climate change. For example, crops can be ruined by drought or flooding from heavy rain or rising sea levels and this can mean significant food shortages which means loss of livelihood and malnutrition. This often leads to people being forced to leave their homes in order to find food and shelter elsewhere; by 2050 there will be an estimated 150 million refugees due to this.
A further significant effect is that the spreading of floodwater and changing weather mean that malaria carrying mosquitoes are spreading to highland areas that were previously unpopulated by them. Malaria is one of the biggest causes of death in the developing world especially in children, with much of the control of disease being focused on elimination of the vector mosquitoes. This spread caused by climate change is undoing much of this.
Gordon Brown, Prime Minister in the UK, said in June, that $100 billion needed to be contributed to poorer nations by developed countries in order to help them cope with climate change. As of yet, it is unclear exactly where this money will come from.
The World Bank
Unfortunately, a controversial contribution of the World Bank to developing countries has just been uncovered. The World Bank, who is funded by developed countries including the UK, has a goal of reducing poverty and is spending billions of pounds helping developing countries to build new coal-fired power stations. The World Bank has made several statements regarding it’s stance in trying to reduce emissions and protecting the developing world who are worst effected by climate change. Critics say that by giving this money to build new power stations they are not acting in the long term interests of the poor and that this money should instead be given to supporting renewable energy.
TJC Global is a translation and interpreting company based in Oxford. They have been offering language services to a diverse range of clients for over twenty years.
A campaign is a series of planned activities with a particular social, commercial or political aim.
Campaigning is done against nuclear weapons and war.
Similarly, advertisement, election, empowerment of women and many more activities are promoted by campaigns organized by concerned people.
Nowadays, climate change is one of the fears all living and non-living on earth face.
Crying for the climate change is a campaign active all over the world.
We are very much concerned about our future generation.
Therefore, campaigning on climate change has become popular and sometimes fashion around the world.
Realizing the importance of climate change, the Nobel Foundation awarded Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, the ozone man, former Vice-President of the US and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
They were responsible to bring out the truth that disastrous climate change is caused by global warming for which human activities contribute a lot.
No one believed the statement, but later on the scientists of IPCC calculated the human activities which influence the changes in earth’s climate.
This calculation could make the countries to wake up and think.
A documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” produced by Al Gore opened the eyes of many politicians, planners and people from all walks of life.
In fact, the film won Oscars award for best documentary and best song.
At any cost, the man-made climate change has to be counteracted.
The bad effects of climate change on the Globe over time have been known even before two or three decades.
The green house gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, halocarbons – are responsible for global warming.
The first and foremost effect is the rise in earth’s temperature.
The vulnerable people started dying during summer months in advanced countries like France and Germany.
Once everyone saw such tragic conditions around, they come forward to support the campaign on climate change.
Many organizations interested in the future of humanity cross the world began campaigning against global warming.
Rising temperature affects not only human beings but also animals and plants on Planet Earth.
Prolonged droughts and untimely rain caused crop loss and reduction in food production.
The burning of fossil fuels and large scale air-conditioning are on the increase everywhere in the world.
The commercial interest and political interference do not come forward to support the campaign against global warming.
Those people are not bothered about the far reaching results which are going to be the greatest threat to our future generation who are none other than our own children, grand-children and grand-grand children.
The campaigners caution the policy makers and politicians well in advance to take appropriate measures to reduce or arrest global warming.
In this case, the public at individual level has to cooperate and indulge in action.
The ‘Ten Things To Do” for developed nations was proposed by AL Gore as “Green Agenda”.
They are:
1. Replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights.
2. Dive less.
3. Recycle more.
4. Check vehicle tire pressure for better mileage.
5. Use less hot water.
6. Avoid products with excessive packaging.
7. Plant a tree.
8. Turn off electrical equipment not in use.
9. Adjust your thermostat.
10. Spread the word.
The options laid out are not new to developing nations like India, because most of the organizations including the Government interested in development was campaigning these ten things for quite some time knowingly or unknowingly.
Adoption of most energy efficient technologies should be followed by everyone whether he / she lives in cities or villages.
Carbon sequestration in the soil is one of the measures by which the productivity of dry land can be increased and reduce the carbon emission according to the Director-General of ICRISAT, Hyderabad.
Incorporation of carbon and availability of organic carbon in soil help increasing the crop productivity.
Dry lands occupy 80 per cent of agricultural land and produce 58 per cent of the world’s staple foods.
Such a vast area should help in sequestration of carbon, provided we incorporate green manure regularly into the soil.
It is not a new concept again, an old one taught to me when I was a student of agriculture during 1960s.
Even today the organic farming campaigners recommend this concept to improve the soil fertility and at the same time sequestering carbon.
In this connection, one has to think of the oxidation of organic carbon in the tropical into carbon dioxide.
We are silent on this aspect.
However, I feel someone has to look into this crucial problem.
Probably, ICRISAT, a world body may think of the sequestration of carbon in tropical soils and its fate in the long run.
Forests are one of the largest ‘sink’ for carbon dioxide.
Deforestation caused by human activities and large scale wild fire brings down the ‘sink size’ and allow the earth to emit more carbon dioxide.
Coal based power plants emit enormous quantity of carbon dioxide.
Therefore, the suggestion is to opt for nuclear and solar power.
Renewable energies such as wind, solar and biofuel were highlighted as important sources to reduce the global warming to 2.0 – 2.4oC, generally recognized as the threshold level.
Report after report stresses the need for controlling the climate change through a number of campaigns all over the world – developed, developing and under develop.
Creating awareness among the people of the world is the ultimate aim of most of the organizations interested in global climate change.
Discouraging deforestation, reforestation, using ethanol based bio-fuels, expansion of conservation tillage to reduce carbon release from farm fields are some of the possible measures put forth by various committees instituted for studying the climate change.
In order to follow these policies, there should certainly be a political will and peoples’ participation.
The probability of human activities causing global warming is now 90 per cent as compared to 66 per cent in 2001 according to Dr. R.K. Pachuri, the head of IPCC.
Therefore, it is obvious that the human activities over years have contributed more and more to climate change.
If the present conditions continue, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere will be 550 ppm by 2100 as compared to the present level of 280 ppm.
Curbing the carbon dioxide emissions are in the hands of the US, Australia, Europe, China and India.
The threshold of carbon dioxide concentration is 450 ppm for dangerous climate change.
Global warming also causes significant sea level rise which is unavoidable for many countries during 21st Century.
The fear of global warming is felt by only some people and campaign for climate change.
It is the question of survival in the long run.
If we take it easy now then it would be difficult to cope with the problem at later stage.
Therefore, let us follow the green agenda as much as possible to support the campaign on climate change.
Retried Prof.
Lately most of us hear about global warming much more often. Global warming is a worldwide fact and the word “global warming” is actually a honest phrase for such a complicated matter. As a matter of fact, global warming has more than we can understand from this expression, and that is why it is very important to go at describing this process in today’s big picture. Nowadays word list of analysts and experts, climate conversion as a name is no longer in practice and effect. The motive behind this is that we have happen to become aware of the effect of the transformations we make to our ecosystem will in the long run boost the temperature in many areas of the globe, but in the meanwhile will as well be loss in temperature for some areas of the Earth. This nonetheless, generates a wide-ranging disproportion in the temperature of the planet which in sequence points us to the expression, “global warming.”
Throughout the time of curiousity about the effects of the global warming, the facts you know of as climate conversion are in fact pointed to a global phenomenon of climate change. Nonetheless, with all the facts and materials we posess now, we can beyond doubt conclude that the planet is definately warming with the temperatures going up like never before. Global warming is a worldwide problem with many natural cataclysms started taking place; the general knowledge of this factor is really low. For the better understanding of the consequences related to the climate change, we need a simple description for this process in connection to the warming of the Earth. And this description has to be the one that brings us the heart of this problem without putting in jeopardy the simplicities. However, the closest and most exact definition is that global warming is the effect greenhouse gases have on the planet’s overall environment. Greenhouse gases contain carbon dioxide and methane, but are not limited to those two.
While acquiring information about this process, we have to get the idea about few essential things related to it. The first thing is that global warming is both a natural fact and one put in motion by us. For example, greenhouse gases are a natural part of the biosphere and would be there if man did not exist. As a matter of fact, these gases are a central part to the existence of life on our planet. It is because of the presence of the greenhouse gases, the temperature on planet earth is not around zero degrees! These naturally occurring gases assist to keep the temperature at a desired 59 degrees. But, the climate change, which is because of the greenhouse gases, is not of course natural. Actually, the dilemma we are facing is the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Those gases act as thermal blankets for the atmosphere. The more gas in the atmosphere, the thicker the blanket and the less heat escapes from the planet. In the last 80years, people have been releasing these gases into the atmosphere and as a result helping them to form a blanket. From another prospective, we are reducing forests around the Earth, which are the natural plant collection that suck in greenhouse gases. This abracadabra is starting to show harmful results, the increased heating of our planet, and as follows the start of the scary global warming.
Remembering that the word hoax implies a deliberate falsehood — Where and when did the “global warming hoax” begin? Did the world’s climatologists, environmental scientists, environmental activists, liberal politicians, and other proponents of the man made global warming argument meet in some backroom somewhere and plan it all out?
Are these same scientists, politicians, and celebraties deliberatly surpressing research that counters man made global warming? Are the dozens of peer reviewed journals that publish global warming research in on this vast conspiracy?
How is the vast conspiracy maintained? Is such a hoax conspiracy likely?
Or is it more likely that dozens or hundreds of scientists with diverse backgrounds, working in various fields, came to similar conclusions?
News reports that man may be making the Earth warmer go back at least to the 1940s…
http://www.globalwarmingarchive.com/viewer.aspx?img=19705748&search=Callendar
The concept of global warming was introduced in the 1840s…
So if it is a hoax, as some have claimed, it is a far reaching hoax involving figures in
science, the media, and politics on every continent for 160 years. Does that seem plausible?
One of the famous scientific hoaxes in the world, the so-called Piltdown Man, was exposed 40 year after its conception. The Piltdown Man hoax only involved a few people and was undone through advancements in anthropology. Do you honestly believe that global warming is a hoax that has been carried on for 4 times as long as Piltdown Man and would have involved hundreds, perhaps thousands of people?
“The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people!”
-Senator James Inhofe
Thanks to an outspoken American Senator, the world is being set straight on climate change. Working tirelessly to block Al Gore’s Capitol Hill celebration as part of a seven-continent “Live Earth” concert tour intended to rally the planet in cheerfully addressing runaway global warming, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe speaks with the conviction of a Holocaust denier when he calls climate change “The greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people!”
A least since the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, WMD in Iraq, the Iranian threat, Bush’s Terror War On Terror, and the constitutional curtain-closing Patriot Acts 1, 2 and 3. [The Hill Mar 28/07]
Apparently unafraid of facing future Nuremberg-style environmental trials, Climate Change Deniers such as the National Science Teachers Association have refused 50,000 free DVDs of Gore’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” in fear of alienating heavy corporate funders like Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, which publishes expensive ads in newspapers ridiculing melting glaciers, while also helpfully providing “teaching aids” such as coal coloring books and classroom videos asserting, “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel.”
That means you, Mr. and Mrs. Penguin.
Still, it’s hard to debate a destabilizing 10,000-foot thick glacier. With sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets already at the upper limits of 30 year projections, another 500,000 square miles of Arctic sea ice melted, and Alaska’s glaciers threatening to turn off the winter-warming Gulf Stream by decanting more than 13 trillion gallons of meltwater into the world ocean each year, and Greenland’s fast-melting 2,000 kilometres of solid ice increasing its melting rate over the past five years from a metre a year to a metre a month, and polar bears drowning a hundred miles offshore while looking for ice floes retreating another 300 miles out, and thousands of Canadian harp seal pups experiencing 100% mortality from the same lack of ice, and with the first month of 2007 3.4°F hotter than the any January ever recorded, and the snowpack serving drinking water to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest shrinking toward bare rock, and more than a quarter of the American West in either severe or exceptionally severe drought and Arizona cactus dying from lack of water… it is undeniably clear that the Inhofe is right: the planet can’t be heating up! [Reuters Mar 23/07; CBC Aug 3; Aug 20/04; BBC Radio 4 Aug 7/05; Independent Oct 2/05; Knight Ridder News Service July31/03; New York Times Mar 10/06; www.cejnewsviews.blogspot.com; www.realclimate.org]
On the other hand, an 18-inch rise in sea level would see salt water flowing into the Sacramento River Delta, destroying the drinking water for 23 million Californians. A 20-foot ocean level rise will put half of Florida under water— including Miami, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville—along with the new WTC memorial in Manhattan, and much of Washington DC, where Senator Inhofe is busily blocking climate change-inspired discourse, dancing and music. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer Mar 11/07; BBC July28/04]
In more than 180 countries, one out of every ten people on the planet could soon be chuckling over the climate change hoax while swimming inland. Fortunately for U.S. legislators like Inhofe, only one of these countries is the United States. The rest—China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, Thailand and the Philippines have mostly expendable non-white populations who don’t buy much stuff from the United States, which today primarily produces bullshit, weapons and wars. [Inter Press Service Mar 28/07]
Meanwhile, the rapidly melting and slip-sliding Greenland ice sheet does not know it is a hoax and is set to raise world sea levels 20 to 30 feet, while far to the south, inland Western Antarctic glaciers uncorked by the calving Larson ice shelf are rushing to add another 20-feet or so to the rising sea level hoax. As for the melting Eastern Antarctic… think about relocating to a mountaintop with a dock in your front yard.
OCEANS ‘R’ US
Onboard a planet that is much more Ocean than Earth, the gigantic saltwater buffer covering 70% of its surface is absorbing half of our carbon folly every day. This is not so good, because all this hot water is helping to create vast fishless Dead Zones off the coast of California and Oregon every year for the last five years. Dead zones are also blooming in the waters off Chile, Namibia and South Africa. Nearly 50% of the world’s fisheries are in these areas. [BBC News Feb 17/07]
Even worse, in contributing to a 25 million ton carbon deposit into the One World Ocean every day, we are seeing a resulting carbonic reaction that is rapidly turning this whole big watery wilderness acidic. [www.earthfiles.com Aug 13/04; Agence France-Presse July 20/05]
And those 25 million daily acid-making tons are increasing rapidly.
Meanwhile, the global warming hoax so stridently opposed by Senator Inhofe means that temperatures in Eastern Europe are not averaging 8° Fahrenheit above normal, even though they are. Canada on average is more than 5 degrees warmer than normal, and hoax-ridden Siberia is 9°F hotter than usual. [Agence France-Presse Feb 16/07; AP Feb 16/07]
THE HEAT IN PEAT
This is a scream because the world’s largest frozen peat bog stretches for a million square kilometres across western Siberia’s once permanently frosty permafrost. Warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, this time bomb tundra contains several hundred billion tons of methane that—if thawed by a few more cheap flights to Mexico—could be burped like a giant cow fart into an atmosphere already dangerously overloaded with fast-food bovine flatulence. [NewScientist.com Aug 11/05]
Thing is, each teeny molecule of methane released into the atmosphere destroys millions of sunshielding ozone molecules. And despite the hoax of ozone layer depletion, last year’s 11 million square miles ozone hole over the Antarctic was the biggest ever recorded, with local ozone absence often reaching 99%. No more ozone means no more plankton means no more oxygen and no more fishies. [National Science Foundation Press Release Dec 17/03; www.greenguerrilla.com/om.htm; Agence France-Presse Dec 26/06]
Another thing is, one molecule of methane also traps 21 times more heat than a measly molecule of carbon dioxide. [EPA]
Suddenly—hopefully—that next drive to Burger King may not seem as urgent as leaving the key unturned in the aptly-named ignition. Because about another two or three degrees rise in global temperatures could release more heat-trapping tundra methane all at once than all the carbon released over the past 100 years. [Baltimore Sun Dec 16/04]
THE IPCC HOAX
But as Inhofe urges, relax and throw another log on the fire. The good news is that the latest alarming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections showing an “upper range” temperature increase of about 11°F by this century’s end based on carbon burning trends in places like the USA, Canada and China turn out to be baloney.
The bad news is that 1,200 of the world’s best atmospheric scientists at the IPCC forgot to factor in land-based methane releases, which are “emptying at an alarming rate,” according to Chris Freeman of the University of Wales. Apparently uninformed that methane levels already rising three-times faster than CO2 are a hoax, a frightened Freeman exclaims, “It’s a vicious circle. The problem gets worse and worse, faster and faster” as more methane heats the atmosphere releasing more methane and so on. [National Science Foundation Press Release Dec 17/03; NewScientist.com Aug 11/05]
Even with the terrible tundra factored in, panicked oceanographers are warning that just a few degrees more ocean warming could release another 2,000 billion tons of methane gas into the atmosphere. That’s a lot. In fact it’s enough to trigger a sudden “destabilization event” even worse than a jilted spouse.
We won’t like it. A NASA study confirmed that 55 million years ago a similarly tremendous underwater methane burp instantly heated Earth’s atmosphere by up to 13° F within a few decades. This messed up a lot of finned, feathered and furred lives, disrupting climate worldwide for more than 100,000 years.
Some 200 million years before that, another series of methane releases came close to wiping out all life on a lone space colony called Earth. As oxygen levels plummeted and organic life teeter-tottered on the brink of extinction, more than 94% of marine species headed for off-planet dimensions. It took between 25 and 100 million years for coral reefs and forests to regrow into their former diversity.
For those of us who don’t like waiting for anything, such an interruption could be extremely aggravating.
NOT ALL CYCLES ARE BICYCLES
These Big Extinction Events—and other periodic warming and cooling episodes—are what people like Inhofe and your neighbors and coworkers mean when they say that climate change is “cyclical”. They’re right. But not in the way they mean.
For example, about 12,700 years ago average temperatures in North Atlantic region abruptly plummeted nearly 5°C and remained that way for 1,300 years. The Younger Dryas is named after a cold-loving Arctic wildflower that flourished during this era in the US and European regions, where icebergs extended as far south as the coast of present day Portugal.
Another abrupt warming took place about 1,000 years ago that allowed Norse voyagers to settle a northern green land. Three centuries later, the Norse abandoned their Greenland settlements when the climate chilled abruptly—with even more profound agricultural, economic, and political impacts in Europe. In the USA, the American revolution was nearly aborted by rapid climate shift as Washington struggled to get his thinly-clad troops across the icebound Delaware.
“Rapid changes in ocean circulation are linked to these abrupt climate changes,” Robert Gagosian, President and Director Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2003. “A growing body of evidence demonstrating linkages among ocean-related climate shifts, ‘megadroughts’ and precipitous collapses of civilizations, including the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia 4,200 years ago, the Mayan empire in central America 1,500 years ago, and the Anasazi in the American Southwest in the late 13th century.”
Now a lot more people could experience that excitement again. In May 2005, climate change researcher Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, aimed sonar upwards beneath the Arctic ice cap from Royal Navy submarines and correlated ships’ measurements across the Greenland Sea to detect that one of the two “heat pumps” driving the Gulf Stream had weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.
“Until recently we would find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared,” Wadhams said. “As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe.”
Today, the powerful Gulf Stream that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters conveyed from the tropics has slowed by 30% in the last dozen years. According to UK newspapers, “The Gulf Stream delivers the equivalent of 1 million power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, propping up temperatures by 10C in some regions. Ireland, Britain and northwestern Europe lie on the same latitude as Siberia.” The shut down of this Gulf Stream “radiator” could lead to a century or more of no frost-free days on the northern European, UK and US Atlantic seaboards—at a time when the end of cheap oil sends fuel oil and food transport costs skyrocketing. [Sunday Times (Ireland) May 8/05; Guardian Dec 1/05]
While unusually violent solar flares are not linked to these major climatic events, cold northern meltwater and methane releases caused by mass volcanic eruptions are. On a Gaian world driven by intricately interconnected feedback mechanisms to maintain narrow margins of mammalian habitability, volcanism may somehow be cyclical.
But humans are cynical. And our denial is much more dangerous. As U.S. government geologist John Atcheson observes, “Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions.” According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels in cars, jets, ships, wood stoves and power plants releases more than 150 times the amount of volcanic carbon dioxide—”the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii’s Kilauea.” [Baltimore Sun Dec 16/04]
Inhofe says that more than 700 million cars and trucks running their motors an eggshell-thin atmosphere as enclosed as any garage are not affecting anything. [Independent Dec 6/03; Globe and Mail Apr11/98]
Atcheson, says, “Once these methane releases really get cooking, it’s likely to play out all the way.” [Independent Dec 6/03]
BUY LOCAL—HELP OIL TANKERS RETIRE NOW
Carbon dioxide emissions from shipping are increasing at an alarming rate and could rise by as much as 75% in the next 15 years unless we stop shopping for cheap junk at Wal-Mart and similar Chinese coal-plant prodding consumption emporiums. All this shipping traffic to deliver consumer toys and oil is nearly double Britain’s total emissions and more than all African countries combined.
For anyone who still believes in leaving their personal responsibility and children’s’ future to governments governed by corporate interests, more than 200 million tons of carbon emissions from 70,000 perpetually steaming ships do not come under the Kyoto agreement or any proposed European legislation. Few studies have been made of the vehicles that transport 90% of our not-so-goods over thousands of sea miles.
“Buying local” takes on new urgency and appropriateness with 20,000 new ships on order and shipboard emissions heading toward more than a million tons a day by 2020. [Guardian Mar 3/07]
STATES OF UNION
Apparently still clueless that climate change is a hoax, 409 mayors have signed a climate-protection agreement requiring cities to reduce greenhouse emissions, and 29 states have already passed legislation limiting greenhouse gases. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is also seeking to terminate global; warming by imposes the first state cap on greenhouse gas emissions that will reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Last Monday, the governors of Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico announced a regional agreement on climate change.
On Thursday—as temperatures rose to the highest level ever for March at 11 locations across Japan—Senate hearings examined these state and local programs as models for federal legislation. [Kyodo news Mar 30/07]
On Sunday, Vice President Al Gore won an Academy Award for his must-see documentary on global warming.
As astonished Japanese hauled out their Saki for cherry blossom-viewing in a Tokyo sweltering under July-like temperatures, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, “We are making tough choices. We are investing our taxpayers’ money. We are transforming our cities into laboratories for climate protection. In short, we are making a difference, and laying the groundwork for strong federal policies and programs.”
Calling on Congress to pass a plan “that calls for a hard and declining cap on emissions,” Nickels insisted that cities and states should be eligible for federal grants that underwrite innovative programs and research. “We need the federal government to take on a leadership role now so that we move beyond the grass-roots innovation that is blossoming in every state in the country,” he said.
But blowing up Iraq and Afghanistan, and getting ready to blow up Iran, Syria, North Korea and possibly Canada if we don’t fork over the rest of our natural gas, oil and fresh water for SUVs and desert golf courses, continues to vacuum nearly every shekel—er, dollar—from the U.S. economy. As Truthout’s Environmental Editor Kelpie Wilson points out, the anticipated cost of the Iraq slaughter “will be at least a trillion dollars. The installed cost of solar power is currently about $9 a watt, so $20,000 would buy a 2.2 kilowatt solar power system. That is enough power for a household with modest needs to spin the meter backward a good portion of the time. A trillion dollars would put a system like that on 50 million roofs.” [Truthout.com Mar 29/07]
SURGES
With the real surge taking place not in Baghdad but across the globe, as current levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere leaped higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years and worldwide carbon fuel emissions surged past 900 tons each second, the doughty Senator Inhofe said he would fight any proposal based on California’s model that is already reducing traffic, de-stressing people’s lives and putting more saved fuel dollars in their pockets.
“Let’s be honest about what these programs, and their companion proposals here in Congress, really are,” Inhofe said. “They are the biggest tax increase in U.S. history. In fact, they are worse than taxes.” [Seattle Post-Intelligencer Mar 2/07]
Was the Oklahoma senator perpetrating his own hoax? By becoming the first local government in the United States to deal with climate change back in 1993, the city of Portland has already achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions below 1990 levels—while booming in smiles, improved health and cash savings.
“People have looked at it the wrong way, as a drain,” Mayor Tom Potter patiently explained after parking his Prius hybrid. “Actually it’s something that attracts people. It’s economical. It makes sense in dollars.”
Portland has led the way into a more fun, less carbon future by installing two light rail lines and a streetcar system, and 750 miles of bicycle paths. As a result, another 10 out of every hundred residents have left their dangerous cars chained up and are happily commuting by foot or on bicycle. [Guardian Mar 5/07; Washington Post Feb 27/07]
FLIPPING THE OTHER SWITCH
The “DO NOT CROSS” threshold of a further two degree temperature rise must be avoided at all costs—even if it means turning off computers, TVs and other appliances in tens of thousands of showrooms—and similar gadgets not actually in productive use in the office or at home.
Why not switch off global warming now?
And put the cash savings in your jeans?
And maybe not work so hard to keep all these machines turned on. Even when you think they’re turned off. Which could be the biggest hoax of all.
“Number one is to turn things off when they are not in use,” Wilson suggests. “Seventy-five percent of the electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off. Across the US, this equals the annual output of 12 power plants and costs consumers over $1 billion each year. Buy some power strips so you can take back control over these ‘vampire loads.’ Light bulbs are also crucial. Lighting is about 25 percent of US electricity use. Compact fluorescent light bulbs use about one-third the energy of incandescent bulbs. [Truthout.com Mar 29/07]
Another big blind spot is that we in North America are too often locked by our media mesmerizers and cultural conditioning into thinking that what we see and hear around us is the way things are everywhere.
Not!
Flip on the Internet, buy a copy of the New Economist, chat up a visitor and the great and joyous news is that 95% of global humanity do not live here—and are not subjected to the ignorant bleating of Senators like I’m-a-foe, and presidential pretenders like Cheney, I mean Wolfowitz, I mean Perle, I mean JINSA, I mean Bush.
Europe is moving fast fast fast to wean itself off a species limiting carbon addiction. So is Scandinavia. Even Big Bad China, in the midst of its coal-fired-power-plant-a-week frenzy, is acknowledging planetary peril and attempting to put on the carbon brakes while rolling out windmills, electric bicycles and paradigm-changing Lithium Ion batteries in truly Chinese quantities.
Across the warming ocean in the other direction, to avoid a further 2 degrees centigrade temperature rise, further polar melting, and catastrophic methane releases—the woman-led German government is calling on industrialised countries to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 20% by 2020, and 60% by 2050. [Independent Dec 6/03]
That would help. A rapid 90% low-carbon diet might stave off calamity.
With targets—and incentives—like this, the opportunities for personal creativity, long wished for lifestyle changes, and entrepreneurship are boggling!
“Now is our chance to develop the American low-energy lifestyle. The Japanese use half the energy we do, yet still maintain an affluent lifestyle. Many European countries do the same. We can look to Japan and Europe for models, but we can also do it our own way,” Kelpie Wilson says—while powering her family’s fully but carefully equipped Oregon home with solar panels and a micro-stream generator for 11 months of the year.
REURGENCE AND REBIRTH
After thousands of hours of meticulous research, this writer can say definitively that climate change is not happening.
Forget “climate change”. The gradual warming of the Earth—which actually sounds inviting to shivering Northern Hemispherians—is nonsense.
We are actually well past climate change. We are now experiencing rapid Climate Shift.
And if we don’t flip off unneeded car and plane trips, appliances, light switches, deadbeat politicians, and consumption-driven network television right now—we could trip the switch on Climate Flip.
This means us, Mr. and Mrs. North America. As Flavia Nunes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California points out, the key finding from ice core samples and the geological record is that “the Earth is a system that can change very rapidly”—once an enclosed, recirculating atmosphere is saturated with the heat-trapping effluence of our affluence. [Christian Science Monitor Jan 26/06]
The heartening news is that Climate Shift is causing a concomitant Consciousness Shift. A lifeboat mentality is beginning to displace our misplaced “me first” conditioning as the realization sinks in that we could all sink down if our spaceship Earth founders on the reefs not of carbon and methane, but our own denial.
The answer to the biggest motivator for transformation yet enjoyed by challenge-loving and ultimately cooperative hominids is as simple—and immediate—as changing our minds.
So why not pull those plugs, jump on your bike, and visit a friend or your local farmer’s market right now? The liberating lesson of climate shift is that we can move just as quickly away from fear, guilt, loneliness, and the treadmill stress of credit card serfdom to enjoy true “freedom” as masters of our destiny in a supportive and approving community.
[The author has clicked off his nonessential electrical power bars, scrapped his old pickup, and is converting his recumbent bike to electric power.]
WHO IS WILLIAM THOMAS?
I am an award-winning Canadian author, reporter, photographer and filmmaker. A former Vancouver Sun “photog” – his feature writing and accompanying photographs subsequently appeared in more than 50 publications in eight countries, including translations into French, Dutch and Japanese.
My 30-minute video documentary Eco War won the 1991 US Environmental Film Festival award for “Best Documentary Short”. Excerpts from this “front-lines” chronicle of a three-man environmental emergency response team in Kuwait aired in an eight-part CBC Gulf War mini-series, and have been shown on CNN and NBC television, as well as Noam Chomsky’s feature film, “The Corporation”.
During and immediately after the Gulf War, I served five months in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as a member of a three-man environmental emergency response team.
Winner of four Canadian feature-writing awards, I am the author of Days Of Deception: Ground Zero and Beyond; All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion, Scorched Earth, Bringing The War Home, Alt Health, Stand Down, Dialing Our Cells: Cell Phone Health Hazards and the recently updated Chemtrails Confirmed.
A former pilot, ocean sailing master and frequent radio talk-show guest, I currently live and work in the Gulf Islands off Canada’s west coast.
Visit my investigative reporting website: willthomasonline.net
Visit my photography website: willthomasphotography.com
For a long time it has been believed that the effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply is going to be a positive one. This is because the rising level of carbon-dioxide resulted for global warming will help the greeneries for photosynthesis.
Thus there will be a rise of agricultural production and food supply. The theorem received a boost after the evidence of a sharp rise of barley production as one of the effects of global warming in Iceland which was quite impossible even few years ago.
But more recent experiments and researches have revealed that the effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply are not that good after all. AN UNEP 2001 report on the global warming has predicted that USA is going to have more droughts, floods, landslides and storms.
Winter will gradually be shortened and sobered down, while summer will rise in expansion and severity. Along with this heavy rain, big storm, heavy snowfall, high sea level, increasing coastal erosion and other problems will occur.
Though as one of the effects of global warming, the overall food supply and production level is supposed to rise in USA, but the Great Plains will suffer with more droughts resulting for global warming.
Even now many effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply have been perceived. The popular maple syrup production of North east USA has diminished by 10%, moving its production zone to farther north for shorter and warmer winter.
On the other hand as one of the effects of global warming the south west USA is suffering from a water shortage which will increase in coming days. The zone has become dry for any standard agricultural production with an apprehension of resettling Dust Bowl of 1930s’ by the year 2030 for global warming.
Following a report of IPCC on the global warming, California’s snow covered Sierra Mountains can reduce in near future by up to 60-90%. This will create dire water shortage in summer, making the Central Valley area unsuitable for agricultural production for global warming. The State University of Colorado has declared that the area is going to be less productive due to effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply.
As the effects of global warming, the food supply production in Florida is going to suffer a lot due to frequent and large scale floods. Also one of the most profitable agricultural products of USA – corn will suffer a bad condition due to dry and hot atmosphere for global warming.
As another example of the effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply – with the rise of temperature by 3 to 11 degrees in this century, the production rate of the main crops – the rice, corn, wheat, barley, soybeans and sorghum – will be cut down by 3-5% for each point rise of temperature for global warming.
However with all these effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply, new attempts have been made to adjust the agricultural and food production method according to the changing atmosphere. So to fight the effects of global warming, the researchers have established new methods of production with continuous revision of models. But still the best possible process to reduce the effects of global warming on agriculture and food supply is to be established.